brave

As you will have spotted by now, I often use running as an analogy for other aspects of life – and talk about the lessons that running can teach us…

Well today’s lesson has something to do with staying calm, doing something I hate doing, not panicking and having faith that it will all work out fine…

Today I had the worst tempo run. ever. Schedule went something like this:

0 – 1.7 K warm up at a comfortable pace
1.7 – 8K miles run at 5:25 – 5:40
8K – 10K miles cool down at a comfortable pace

What actually happened was I set off at a comfortable pace, could feel a little jarring with the ab, but things seemed to ease up as I warmed up and I slowly built up to tempo pace.

I hit tempo pace at about 1.5km, relaxed into it and focused on keeping the pace as even as possible. I could feel the ab at times, but it didn’t seem to bother me.

At 5km (approx) I turned a corner and was greeted by a fairly strong headwind. For reasons that I cannot fully explain, it beat me. I collapsed mentally and wound up walking. With hindsight I think it was probably the ab niggling away that led to this happening.

I tried to get going again and found it uncomfortable to do so. Every pace, every time my body hit the pavement, every up and down movement, every pull and push on the pelvic area hurt. Not a sharp stabbing pain, not even a lot of pain really, but total discomfort, a dull aching, above and to the sides of the groin, and at the base of the ab muscle itself.

I walked for ages, then slowly built into a bit of a walk/jog – walking was fine, jogging was fine as long as it was a slow, unhurried shuffle.

As soon as I tried increasing the pace, I would get an uncomfortable reminder to slow down.

At the 5km mark I’d been quite upset – with a couple of good runs under my belt (Sunday and Tuesday) I thought things were heading in the right direction again. This was not how it was supposed to play out.

But with 5km to stop and think about things, I calmed down, I got it under control and I started to test where the pain was, applying light pressure with my fingers.

It actually feels as though it could be the bone rather than the muscle, or possibly a combination of the two at the point where the muscle attaches.

Consulting with Dr Google shows it could well be early stages of “osteitis pubis”; if that’s the case it’s early stages and easily rectified. The probable causes being the increased distances I was putting in towards the end of last year, and trying to push my long run paces too hard this year. Too much, too soon, and not listening to my coach’s advice fully!

That’s just guesswork for now though – I have to wait 27 hours for my GP appointment. For now it’s a case of resting up and reflecting on the lessons to be learned!